Trends in UK contact lens prescribing 2015

With this short paper, we mark our 20th consecutive annual survey of contact lens prescribing in the UK. This work was initiated in the mid 1990s to try to monitor the then recently launched daily disposable lens modality, and because we have used the same basic approach since inception, we have a powerful dataset to reflect on changes in prescribing habits over time in addition to examining the results from individual years.1-19

In January 2015 we randomly selected 1,000 registered practitioners (700 optometrists and 300 contact lens opticians) from the GOC register and sent a single page A4 questionnaire to each. We asked the recipients to record information about the first 10 patients prescribed contact lenses after receipt of the survey. We requested data about the following: date of fitting, new fit or refit, age and sex of patient, lens material, lens design, frequency of replacement, days per week of wear, modality (daily or extended wear) and care system. A weighting system was employed to account for the volume of activity undertaken by the respondents, as judged by the time period required to achieve 10 fits.